Looking after ourselves: self-care techniques

To provide support and care to those around us, we first need to look after ourselves. It can feel hard to find the time to look after yourself when your work and personal lives are busy, but we need to make the time. Sometimes we can feel guilty for looking after ourselves but it is vital to us being able to help others. We are reminded of this importance from a physical perspective when we listen to a safety briefing on a flight when we are told to fit our own masks before other people around us. Following an adverse clinical outcome and at any other time that we are feeling low or overwhelmed in our job, we must remember the need to look after ourselves from a psychological perspective. If we do not look after ourselves, this is when our health can get worse and result in feelings of burnout. The importance of self-care in midwifery is described nicely in this article by a midwifery lecturer in Cardiff. Likewise, our recent review highlighted the importance of self-care in preventing burnout in midwives (https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1871519225002410?via%3Dihub.

Self-care techniques are things we do individually to help us maintain good health and reduce feelings of anxiety and stress. They can include many things that help to maintain physical and psychological health, such as:

Physical behaviours such as going for a walk, engaging in yoga practices at home or in a class, eating well, staying hydrates and getting plenty of rest including a good night’s sleep.

Social activities such as spending time with people with like or doing something new like visiting a new place or exhibition.

Other examples of self-care ideas:

We need to try and make these behaviours part of our daily routine so need to be realistic in terms of what we can do and what we cannot do. We also need to be kind to ourselves and not feel guilty when we do not manage to engage in self-care. Setting plans can help with this and need to be individual to our own needs and demands e.g., walking children to school can be a way to spend time with your children whilst being active. Listening to a podcast on the walk back from school can be an example of doing something you enjoy or something new.

Prioritising our demands can also be a good way to help us take stock of our current activities and make time for self-care. It can be useful to write on a piece of paper all the activities that are demanding our time. Using a separate pen, you can then cross out the activities that do not need to be dealt with immediately. This will then leave us with a smaller list of demands and free up some of our cognitive resources. This means that we will have more attention, thought and time to deal with the demands which make us feel more in control and able and hopefully free up some time to engage in more self-care.

Mindfulness

Mindfulness can help us manage when our body is starting to react to anxiety or we are getting lost in our thoughts and feelings, by paying attention to the current moment including your bodily sensations, your environment and thoughts. Being in the present helps us to not think too much about what has happened and what is going to happen which saves energy to use when managing how we feel and behave in the present.

There are many ways we can be mindful, this can be techniques like these presented by MIND here. Some easy-to-use mindfulness practices then help to ground you in the moment include:

The square breathing method – picture a square, now take a deep breath in while you visually draw a line from one corner to another, breathe out at the next corner and then repeat this until you have visualised a square.
The 5,4,3,2,1 method – first think of 5 things you can see, then think of four things you can hear, three things you can feel, two things you can smell and end with one thing you can taste.

Tips on ways to create a routine of being mindful can be found here.